Basis of History

Hawera Star, Volume L, 7 March 1931, Page 16

Basis of History

a, NY ONE studying the law of evidence A\ comes quickly up against the eontradicJljL tions of witnesses—contradictions which

invest facts with chameleon colours and protean shapes (writes J. H. Hudson in the “Auckland Star”). Two men, looking at the selfsame things, concentrate each upon different aspects; and a mere' residue of what they tell gains their joint confirmation. But when the mists of memory and the temptations of tale embroidery have wrought their miracles, then law courts and historians have to whittle sans mercy to reach the native rock of reality. European knowledge of written South Sea history is fortunate indeed in its documents.

Cook and Banks, on opposite sides, figuratively, of a bulkhead, writing in their journals night by night the story of the previous day’s advantures—recording identical doings at. short range of time—ensure intensely the fundamentals of that voyage’s history. Y"et how the picture is enriched by the different angles at which they approach their subject matter. Cook, a seaman by training, made exact in essentials by much jotting of professional details, yet sees things in a wide aspect of sound judgment, Banks, younger, with a country gentleman’s outlook. yet influenced almost equally by his enthusiasm for science, brings much of bis own to the quota. The nautical observer is a competent witness, the scientific student has a parallel value; and I cannot find, anywhere in history, better joint proof of the broad facts involved.

How wide a contrast do we find in the tradition of the Maori arrival. Here, after twentyfive generations and half a millenium of time have watered—or fortified—the wine of history, we yet find a substratum of fact of occupation and tenure of lands sufficiently attested by intertribal proof to warrant the payment of immense sums, in land purchase by the New Zealand Treasury. The presence of the race, here in New Zealand and afar off in Polynesia, proves their transit; while their cultivation of tropic food plants in both places certifies that they had a tropic centre of dispersal. Their traditions, as collected both by Grey and White, asseverate in various forms that they came here starving and exhausted. But this Dr. Buclc cannot believe; though, in particular, the two Whangaparoa place-names commemorating their escape from starvation by finding stranded whales by whose blubber they were restored to vigour, should be conclusive. Possibly, however, Whangaparoa hails from earlier folklore, antedating their arrival here. The name may have been brought from a former home without its meaning—as

Records—Written and Unwritten

Weird Interpreters of Fact

Claremont came to a very level farm near JLvaitaia—or Thames climbed ashore to become a hillside mining township. But, on the whole, I put faith in the “Bricks of the chimney that Jack Cade’s father built,” i.e., in the incident memorandum by place-name of the mercy that rescued the farflung 1 sea wanderers and made possible what the late Captain Bollons deemed impossible. For he could not believe the tradition, because he judged such a voyage in such a craft could never come to pass; though Bligh’s historic boat voyage after the mutiny of the Bounty almost parallels in pakeha times the achievement of the Maori. That they are here as well as at the Society Group might almost have persuaded even a master mariner that they came! But perhaps, with seamanlike jealousy, he suspected them of coming overland? How hath great Plato, with his. lost Atlantis, discounted the seamanship of men forerunning the compass and chronometer! Columbus was our first real expert with the compass; and the first chronometers were being tried out on a West Indian voyage, while Cook was charting New Zealand. Yet the Norse, six centuries before Columbus, left their landmarks from Greenland and Massachusetts to Constantinople and Alexandria. Phoenician traders, before the Christian era, had won their way in undecked craft to India, to the Baltic and to the land of the gorilla. If the Maori left the great world before the discovery of metals we must, according to Flinders-Petrie, date his exit at least 7000 years ago. This is certain, that he had reached every remotest islet of the Pacific before the advent of Anson—per-

haps before Magellan. He and his were not first-class passengers. They did not jib like English servants because they found the conditions not what they were used to. But —flying from implacable enemies or lured by the visions of hope—they launched themselves forth upon the diamond road to everywhere, and they held on through the salt, spindthrift that flayed raw their bodies, through the tropic glare by day and roaring storm by night to that hoi]r of pallid dawn when the Long White Cloud (Au-tea-roa) resolved itself into a Wide Free Land (Ao-ate-a-roa) ; and the starving crew had achieved Captain Bollons’ impossible. It is a story as epic in its human quality as the discovery of America or Drake’s immortal cireum-naviga-tion; and any loss of faith therein y/ill leave the spiritual consciousness of a noble race impoverished forever. How it was is not for us to prove; that it sprang from brave hearts and some starlear is a fixed star in the heavans of humanity.